Print
Email
Look It Up
AT A GLANCE
Feminism
6 articles on Feminism
Feminist Movement
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 898 Includes: BibliographyFeminism is the belief that women should be equal to men in the economic, social, and political spheres. Feminism also refers to political and intellectual movements among diverse groups of women working to attain gender and political equality. The aims and purposes of the feminist movement, known earlier as the women's rights movement, were drafted at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. The organizers of the Seneca Falls Convention, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Amy Kirby Post, had all been previously involved with the abolitionist movement and were personal friends of Frederick Douglass. Their involvement in the abolitionist movement caused them to reevaluate their subservient condition within American society. Using skills and political awareness gleaned from the antislavery movement, they spearheaded the movement for women's rights. The cross-pollination of ...
Read full articleBlack Feminism in Latin America and the Caribbean
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 827Political movement that seeks to promote the issues of black women in the region. The black women's movement in Latin America and the Caribbean has been deeply marked by the region's political, social, and cultural diversity. The countries of this region share a common past of colonial rule maintained during four centuries on the basis of exterminating large indigenous populations and enslaving an estimated 10 to 15 million Africans.Black women have played a key role in the history of their peoples and in the history of Latin America and the Caribbean. Throughout the colonial period until the present, they have preserved African values. Black women have been responsible for the survival and re-creation of African cultures and religious practices. These cultures and practices have offered different models of life and death, the feminine and the masculine, nature, and divinity. Black women ...
Read full articleFeminism in Africa: An Interpretation
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 2646 Includes: Distinctive Features of African Feminism | Cultural Roots of African Feminism | Contemporary African FeminismFemale activism and feminist movements in Africa. In contrast to much of the twentieth century, today we can talk about African feminism because African women themselves do so, and because they have quite clear ideas about what they mean when they use the term. Albertina Sisulu, the respected senior woman in the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa, and the wife of Walter Sisulu, symbolized this new wave of female activism when she joined the women's walkout at the ANC Party Conference in Durban in 1992. The walkout demanded that the ANC commit itself to 33 percent female representation in Parliament and other government positions in the new South Africa to come. This form of feminism in South Africa is but one of many feminisms in Africa. Feminism varies both among the various nations as ...
Read full articleFeminism in Islamic Africa
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 1571 Includes: Historical Context | Feminism and IslamApproximately one-third of Africa's population is Islamic, and several African countries identify themselves as Islamic states. Many of the goals of the feminist movement in Islamic Africa are common to feminist movements throughout the world—access to education and the labor market, and power in the world of public decision making. But in Islamic Africa, the movement has also responded to the particular problems women face in their own countries, problems shaped by cultural identity and class.The feminist movement in Islamic Africa draws on a rich tradition of women's political participation. In nineteenth-century Egypt, middle- and upper-class women formed organizations that promoted modernizing projects, such as health-care reform and education for girls. Other women participated in male-dominated political movements, especially the anticolonial resistance of ...
Read full articleFeminism in the United States
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 5561 Includes: What Is Black Feminism? | Core Themes in Black Feminism | Laying the Foundation: 1890–1920 | Working for Change: 1920–1960 | Contemporary Black Feminism: 1960–Present“Shall it any longer be said of the daughters of Africa, they have no ambition, they have no force?” asked Maria W. Stewart in 1831. “By no means,” she answered. “Let every female heart become united.” Stewart's call for black women's unity, together with those offered by other prominent nineteenth-century black feminists such as Sojourner Truth, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Harriet Tubman, and Lucy C. Laney, marked the beginning of black feminism in the United States. Although these black women laid the intellectual and political cornerstone of black feminism, African American women in the twentieth century brought black feminism as a political movement, and black feminist thought as its intellectual voice and vision, to full fruition.Black feminism originated in the lived experiences that ...
Read full articleFeminism
Source: Black Women in America, Second Edition
Word Count: 8526 Includes: Abolitionists: Roots of Black Feminisms | The Growth of Black Feminisms | The Second Wave: The Women's Liberation Movement | Contemporary Feminisms | BibliographyAs both an analytical tool and a political paradigm, black feminisms—referred to here in the plural because there is no one feminism—are fluid and diverse, focusing in various ways on the convergence of race, gender, sexuality, class, spirituality, and culture. This diversity is often oversimplified in an effort to provide a single, coherent picture. The primary expressions of black feminism in the United States are marked by three distinct periods or waves that are directly connected to, and grew out of, key movements in African American history: the abolitionist movement, which culminated with the suffragists' securing passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 ; the modern civil rights and black power movements, which peaked with the enforcement, during the 1970s, ...
Read full article